cadet blogs

By now I have been in school for longer than one would ever desire. However, despite the fact that I have spent the last 16 years of my life involved in academics, I am by far the world’s worst test taker. You want to talk about anxiety? I am the queen of quiz crashing and the tyrant of test-taking tragedies. I have yet to learn the secret of balancing time management and discipline. Procrastination, it seems, is my prowess (and awesome alliteration, if you haven’t caught on to that by now). Anyhow, I felt it was finally time to admit my faults and move on. After all, they always say that the first step in change is recognizing what is wrong. If you didn’t know by now, I have switched majors from Mechanical Engineering to Civil Engineering (which is a whole different story within itself that I have yet to attend to). As a result, I am dealing with a whole new set of Academy faculty members on a daily basis. I couldn’t be happier here; the Civil Engineering department contains some of the hardest working, dedicated instructors I have ever met at the Academy. You probably think that I am just desperate for help at this point in my career and am blowing how awesome they are out of proportion, but I know too many other students who agree with me. For example, my academic advisor has not just told me what I need to do to fix my grades, but she also makes me meet with her at least once a week to ensure that I am not slacking off. My midterm grades weren’t catastrophic, but they weren’t outstanding either. These meetings help give me a new sense of responsibility of not wanting to let her down when we meet.

Back to the procrastination problem, my Environmental Engineering instructor noticed my test taking struggles and has told me that she is going to have an intervention with me. I cracked up at the joke, but she was actually serious. As funny as the idea sounds, it might just be the thing I need. I am so thankful for her, as well as my other teachers and their patience with me. In all honesty, I do feel silly for still struggling like this so far into my cadet career. I am “over the hill” for goodness sake. Sometimes, people just have a hard time getting over really bad habits. For me, all it takes to fix them is my decision to change and a good butt kicking from some awesome instructors.